Cerebral Sci-Fi Films That Wipe Our Minds

Christopher Nolan’s dream-noir Inception is that precious Hollywood rarity: A taut sci-fi thriller constructed largely within the architecture of the mind. The movie’s intellectual interrogation of the blurred line between waking life and lucid dreaming is hammered home with elegant visuals and thunderous music, delivering an impressively heady mix of cinematic brains and brawn.

Cerebral sci-fi is always hard to find, but Wired’s staff banged its brains and salvaged the following classics from speculative cinema’s past. Feed your head, then fire off your favorite mind-wipers in the comments section below.

Children of Men

George Orwell’s future-fascist classic Nineteen Eighty-Four was really about 1948, although it was published in 1949. Same goes for director Alfonso Cuaron’s destabilizing Children of Men: Although its enviropocalypse takes place in 2027, it is really about 2007, although it was released in 2006 and based on P.D. James’ 1992 novel.

Children of Men compressed increasing militarism, class warfare, indefinite terrorism and civic collapse into a too-near nightmare that can still keep you awake at night. And it did it without egregious CGI or high-cost FX, leaning heavily instead on the intelligence of its actors, especially Clive Owen, and its disturbing vision of a world nearly stripped bare of compassion and innocence.

Like director John Hillcoat and novelist Cormac McCarthy’s similarly crushing The Road, Children of Men‘s banal apocalypse is a wake-up call in search of seeking minds.

Brazil

Terry Gilliam’s riotous dark comedy about media, terrorism, bureaucracy, insurgency and too much more to smash into one sentence was an undisputed classic upon its 1985 arrival. Led by manic actor Jonathan Pryce, Brazil‘s mash of Kafka, Orwell and Monty Python proved both entertaining and maddening. For who among us does not know what it is like to be Tuttle-d?

As Gilliam’s superb movie explained, the line between patriot and pariah is a fearsomely thin one. All it takes is a dead fly to turn the innocent Archibald Buttle into suspected terrorist Archibald “Harry” Tuttle, and all hell breaks loose. It’s enough to make one go insane, which is what Pryce’s Sam Lowry spends the film trying to ascertain. Has he lost his mind, or has the world gone mad? And what’s the difference?

Gilliam explored similar themes a decade later in his almost-awesome 12 Monkeys, an upgrade of Chris Marker’s sci-fi montage La Jetee. Loop them up for a triple-feature that will melt your lobes.

THX 1138

Long before George Lucas was bothering with mind-numbing merchandising tie-ins like Ewoks and Jar Jar Binks, he was dissecting the primal dark urges of the ’60s and ’70s. It started with his impressive 1967 student film, Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, and ended with its 1971 adaptation, THX 1138. Like Nineteen Eighty-Four before it, Lucas’ feature-length debut probed the dark spaces between perceived utopias and debilitating dystopias, leaning heavily on mandated medication to alter its victims’ mental states.

The Fountain

Darren Aronofsky’s time-shifting love story The Fountain, starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, took thanataphobia to the nth degree. In three timelines, Jackman tries to save his dying wife, eventually traveling in the 25th century to a blinding nebula in a spaceship bubble bearing a dying tree of life.

The movie flopped at the box office, probably because, as Aronofsky told The Guardian in 2009, “Why pay money for a meditation on losing someone you love? Everything about Western culture denies that.” But hungry minds have a tendency to change, and they probably will on The Fountain.

The Man in the White Suit

Sort of about the clash between innovation and business, director Alexander Mackendrick’s 1951 movie The Man in the White Suit primarily deals with a geeky scientist played by Alec Guiness who creates a machine that burbles and burps and pumps out a fluorescent, unbreakable fabric that’s impossible to stain or rip. Everyone from the garment industry to the little washwoman gets up in arms about it. –Chris Baker

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Director Michel Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s labyrinthine 2004 love story about identity and erasure spent most of its time inside the head of its emotionally tortured lead Jim Carrey, in hopes of obliterating memories of his co-star Kate Winslet. And in the end, he realized that he was thinking from the heart all along. Spoiler alert!

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind‘s greatest strength is that it mixed romantic drama with mind-wiping sci-fi source texts like The Prisoner, pulling a perennial winner from the petri dish. From Gondry’s technical trickery and Carrey’s subtle theatrics to Kate Winslet’s electromagnetic personality and Tom Wilkinson’s predatory memory-erasing machinery, it proved that brilliant sci-fi can take place in inner as well as outer space.

Seconds

Like Point Blank or Blow Up, John Frankeneimer’s Seconds is classic ’60s — the cinematography is consistently far-out, the parties are frantically groovy, and The Man lurks around every corner.

Still, anyone who grokked Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate will love this bleakly comic horror story. Our protagonist (played by John Randolph) is a middle-aged square who’s hounded by some shadowy corporation and a friend who “died” years ago. They convince him to surgically alter his appearance and disappear into a new life. When the bandages come off, he weeps with joy to see a handsome new face under all the hideous stitches and sutures: Randolph has been transformed into Rock Hudson.

Though casting this mediocre screen hunk as an uptight businessman’s alter ego was a stroke of pop genius for Frankenheimer, it was Hudson’s idea to have two actors play the lead, and his surprisingly thoughtful performance galvanizes this harrowing, cerebral thriller (and suggests Hudson’s talents were underutilized). –Chris Baker

Solaris

Andrei Tarkovksy’s measured 1974 film adaptation of author Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris examined how humans are incapable of comprehending the alien minds they are probing because they’re unable to comprehend their own. Fraught with emotional turmoil and shattering hallucinations, they’re unable to differentiate their interior trauma from the exterior world. Put them near a planet that can turn their brainwaves and desires into reality, and everything goes wrong.

Sunshine

Danny Boyle’s underrated, understated Sunshine captured a crew of cosmonauts falling apart at the seams on an interstellar voyage to reignite the sun. The interpersonal havoc wreaked by spending too many million miles in close quarters with the survival of humanity weighing on their shoulders begins to wear them down immediately. But things get more surreal and terrifying once the sun begins to exert its own physical and symbolic power over the minds of those looking to kick-start its heart.

Bonus points go to Boyle for naming one nefarious astronaut Pinbacker, in homage to the troubled space-farer of John Carpenter’s existential sci-fi film Dark Star, another mind-frying classic.

Moon

In director Duncan Jones’ feature debut, helium miner Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) works alone on a lunar base, with only his robotic assistant Gerty and dispatches from his family back on Earth to keep him company. An accident leads to a disconcerting revelation that throws Sam into a mental tailspin. As the rapidly unraveling miner realizes the gravity of his situation, the mental wheels keep turning, making 2009’s Moon into an instant sci-fi classic. –Lewis Wallace

Pi

Darren Aronofsky specializes in the sci-fi mind-wipe. His debut 1998 thriller Pi hurled a math geek into a hell storm of mental illness, murderous multinationals and messianic theologists. In the end, he can’t stop drilling holes in his head in his effort to keep from going insane. The low-budget stunner revealed the deep-thinking Aronofsky to be a directorial force.

The Iron Giant

A gun with a soul is an alien notion in our current sci-fi filmscape, which is infested with bigger and louder weaponry signifying less then ever. But The Iron Giant, director Brad Bird’s animated skewering of military and pop-cultural paranoia, was anchored by one such seeking soul, who, before he bumped his massive head, was merely a killer robot from outer space.

The robot is easily the most humane character in Bird’s stunning film, and for good reason: It’s hard to tell the dumb tools apart from their war-mongering masters. Who’s shooting who?

This essential question infuses The Iron Giant‘s warm heat and fertile mind, with entertaining results. More than any film on this list, this cerebral sci-fi classic is for the entire family, and consistently rewards repeat viewings.

The Iron Giant thinks very deeply about big issues like nuclear apocalypse, interstellar danger, government corruption and social unrest. Its openly exuberant and sobering tale of a boy and his best friend, who just happens to be a death-bringing robot with excellent restraint, is probably the most cerebral sci-film made over the last 10 years that isn’t more depressing than Auto-Tune. And for that, we should meditate on its legacy and wonder.

The Matrix Franchise

The Wachowski brothers’ dizzying bullet-time hypermash of source texts like Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira took viewers, and their brains, down a technocultural rabbit hole. From its central conceit — humans are just consensually hallucinating batteries empowering murderous artificial intelligences that have taken over Earth — to its peripherally intellectual figures like The Architect, The Oracle and onward, The Matrix franchise’s spiraling cerebral strands were practically impossible to pull together into a coherent whole.

It’s safe to say that The Matrix was so cerebral that it thought itself into a corner. After blowing out brains and eyes with deep concepts and breathless action in the first two films — The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded — it threw in the towel on The Matrix Revolutions, leaning too heavily on a wargasmic resolution that failed to deliver on its ambitious gray matter. Too bad.

But even with its obvious missteps, The Matrix came close — albeit in three films, rather than one — to challenging 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s cultural dominance as the smartest sci-fi film ever made. It started exceedingly strong, but anyone who follows bloodsport of any medium will tell you it’s not how you start but how you finish that counts.

2001: A Space Odyssey

The godfather of brainy sci-fi cinema, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s landmark 1968 narrative literally succeeded on two levels — as a book and a film. In fact, both agreed the writing credits should read, “Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, based on a novel by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick.” Now, that’s star power.

As a sprawling exploration of human, artificial and alien intelligence, 2001: A Space Odyssey remains the alpha and omega of cerebral sci-fi films until Christopher Nolan or some other budding heavyweight comes to take its title. Many have tried, and many have failed.

With good reason(s). From its iconic Monolith and smartening primates to its satellite space waltzes and mercenary supercomputer Hal 9000, which had its mind wiped by astronaut Dave Bowman, 2001: A Space Odyssey transformed cinema’s puny universe. Wasting more words on the issue would only sully Bowman’s wordless journey beyond the infinite.